trillium line carries 300,000 passengers in its first four weeks
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oc transpo's trillium line opened jan. 6, 2025 after 17 months of delays in ottawa. lrt shown at ottawa international airport stop.
tony caldwell
/
postmedia
ottawa’s new trillium line lrt logged more than 300,000 customer trips in its first four weeks of service, but it will be a while yet before the trains on lines 2 and 4 begin operating on sundays.
oc transpo released its first ridership statistics for the trillium line on thursday at the city’s transit committee meeting. the long-delayed north-south line began monday-to-friday service on jan. 6 and added saturday service on jan. 25. line 2 runs between bayview station and limebank station, while line 4 is the spur line from south keys to ottawa airport.
“the service has been running well and i’m pleased to report that the service delivery for the first month of operations across both lines has been 98.5 per cent,” troy charter, director of rail and train operations, told the committee, formerly known as the transit commission.
as expected, bayview, south keys and carleton are the three busiest stations, with the new service especially popular with carleton university students.
but oc transpo isn’t ready to run the train seven days a week as it works to correct some issues with the passenger information screens on the trains and in the stations.
“there’s still some work to do,” charter said. “having sundays available allows us to conduct these tests without impacting customers.”
other minor work also needs to be completed, he added, such as graffiti removal and fixing some broken glass — “minor deficiencies” that don’t affect reliability, but need to be done.
thursday’s snow storm was a major test for the system and did cause some problems, including clearing snow off the tracks and some issues with the switches and switch heaters that are vital to the train that shares a single track for much of its route. the glitches caused minor delays throughout the morning.
overall, oc transpo carried 67.9 million passengers in 2024, a seven-per-cent increase from the year before, when annual ridership was 64.2 million. that’s just under 70 per cent of pre-pandemic ridership.
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